Classy Nonsense

Dan Hamann is an entertainer. He is also a onetime actor, longtime musician, and curator of the popular Swimming in Seuss at the much-missed New Mercury Theater and Theater Babylon between 1993-1996. In college, Hamann and his roommate began a casual Friday night variety show that grew into a popular touring act. As one half of Happy Dancing Boots, Hamann wrote comedic songs and performed them for theater audiences.

In the years that followed, he focused on music, but found it difficult to connect with bar audiences. He got involved with fringe theater, but as an actor he was “good in the comedies, not so good in the dramas”. Then, in 2008, he started thinking about his work in college, and writing the songs that would become his new show.

He now returns to his beloved black box with Classy Nonsense, combining years of musical training with an offbeat comic sensibility and a couple truckloads of wit. Dan Hamann fits in to a long tradition of musical satire, from Gilbert and Sullivan to Tom Leher, but he is also a unique new voice pairing beautiful jazz compositions with silly lyrics about barking dogs and overzealous block watchers.

Composed with a theater audience in mind, Classy Nonsense features Hamann performing on both guitar and piano, as well as projections by award winning visual artists Richard Hamann and Holly Tanilai.

Classy Nonsense is directed by Rachel Katz Cary. Katz Carey’s work as a director/dramaturge has been seen in Australia, Spain, and across the US and Canada in a 20 year career that spans Moliere, Shakespeare, Stoppard, Dostoevsky, and Starball—A Dreamy Musical Astronomy Show. She has taught at Lewis & Clark College, University of Minnesota—Duluth, University of Washington and Taproot Theater in Seattle. She is a proud member of the Lincoln Center Director’s Lab West and theater simple, with whom she has directed several world premiere productions, including their acclaimed adaptation of The Master and Margarita. Productions with other companies include: Passport by Bret Fetzer and Blind Spot by Bret Fetzer and Juliet Waller Pruzan (both at Annex); The Visible Horse by Mara Lathrop; and Rick Davis’s new translation/adaptation of Calderon’s Life is a Dream, which was recently published by Smith & Kraus.